Constraint Programming: Services

We offer a number of services that will help you understand and
practise the contents of the lecture. We recommend you to make use
of as many of these services as possible.

Assignments

Assignments encourage you to test your understanding of the concepts
covered in the lecture, and to practise the methods we discuss.

A new assignment will be published every week. After one week, we will publish a sample
solution that you can compare your own solutions to. If you have
further questions, you can discuss them in the tutorial, during the
office hours, and on the mailing list.

Alice/Gecode update

For the time until the next release of Alice, we provide updated packages
that contain the most recent versions of Gecode and the Alice
Explorer. You must install these packages in order to solve
assignment 8, because we made substantial bug fixes for the set
constraints.

For Windows, download alice-gecode-update-win.zip
and unpack it to the directory where the Alice library is
installed. This is typically C:\Program Files\Alice\share\lib.

Ecode

Ecode is the educational constraint development environment. It is
implemented in Alice, and you can use it to learn how a constraint
system is organized as well as to quickly implement new propagation
algorithms. Ecode is available for
download.

Dominance constraints

Tutorial

The tutorial is the prime place to discuss the assigments, and to
ask any other content-related questions about the lecture. The
tutorial usually takes about an hour. The tutors for this lecture
are Marco Kuhlmann and Guido Tack (see the main
page for their e-mail addresses).

Office Hours

During our office hours, we can give you direct support. You may,
for example, want to

resolve individual problems you might have with the lecture,

discuss alternative solutions to the assignments,

ask advanced questions about the contents of the lecture.

Please see the main page to find out about
the time slots for our office hours.

Mailing list

Subscribing to the mailing list is highly recommended. You can use
the list to ask any questions you might have about the lecture. We
will use it to make important announcements.

Click here to
subscribe to or unsubscribe from the mailing list, or to visit the
list archives.